Politics

Election 2015: The science behind increasing voter turnout

In recent years, researchers studying voter turnout have identified several ways to encourage people to do their civic duty, according to USC political science professor Christian Grose.

For starters, try public shaming.

"I would make it where it looks bad if you don’t vote, where people are embarrassed to not have their ‘I voted’ sticker on," Grose said.

This wisdom comes from a well regarded study by researchers at Yale University, where the scientists sent everyone in a neighborhood a mailer letting them know who had and who had not recently voted.

When the next election came around, people were more likely to hit the polls, Grose noted.

"The people who received that social pressure message turned out at a rate of 8 percentage points more than those who weren’t contacted, which is a pretty significant increase," he said.

Grose studied voting in the 2008 Iowa caucuses and found people were more likely to go when they knew their neighbors would be there. However, if people were reminded that voting was public and everyone would see who they supported, turnout would decline.